For more than half a century, Garret FitzGerald's intellect and energy have infused Irish public life.
As far back as most people can remember, he has invariably become involved wherever a serious debate has got going, whether as Taoiseach, academic, journalist, amateur theologian or party leader. His ubiquitousness owes much to his ability to master whatever medium or forum presented itself - whether exhorting conservationist students in Hume Street, slugging it out on the airwaves with political opponents or addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations.
His productivity is legendary. It is said that during his busiest period as Taoiseach he ran up an overnight article for a harassed London editor who did not realise that his occasional contributor was now the prime minister of Ireland. Rather than endeavouring to explain his altered circumstances in a late night telephone conversation - and perhaps leaving a hole in the publishing schedule - Garret simply got up two hours earlier and did his 1,000 words at the typewriter before being collected by his security detail in the morning.
Thus, in terms of volume, Reflections on the Irish State may appear little more than an amuse gueule when set against the scale of some of his other productions. It is a short read compared to his massive autobiography All In A Life (674 pages), published in 1991. But comparisons between the only two books ever written by any former Taoiseach are difficult and not especially useful. All In A Life is a classic political biography, made unique by the fact that its author is one of a handful of Irish public figures with a reputation beyond our immediate shores. Reflections on the Irish State is an exercise in political, economic and social cross-sectioning, seeking to define, describe and elucidate the State in which the author has been citizen and leader, thinker and commentator.
The book offers 12 points of perspective, as it were - 11 essays and an introduction, this last billed as "general reflections on politics". Individually, the essays range over the economy, demographics, education, political life and the electoral system, Europe, Britain, Northern Ireland, church and state, the constitution, standards in public life. But the whole is very much greater than the sum of the parts. Taken together, they form a sort of mind-map, a guide to much of the psyche of the State - and of the society which has developed within it.
Much of what has always made Garret FitzGerald's writings especially valuable is his perspective over time. When he writes with characteristic freshness and urgency on contemporary issues such as the productivity of the Irish educational sector, the miscalculation of tax receipts by the Department of Finance or the Treaty of Nice, it is sometimes easy to forget that this is a man who is 77 years of age, who became Taoiseach two decades ago, who started to work for Aer Lingus in 1947 and who first sat in the Senate in 1965.
He was born in 1926 when the State was in its troubled infancy, with a civil war and an army mutiny just behind it and a newly-born democracy gasping for life. But his political and historical perspective goes beyond the tumultuous events of 1916-1922, back to his father's and mother's generation, when the very idea of an independent Irish state was a radical and improbable proposition. He understands as few political practitioners have done, the sweep and the cycle of history - Irish, British, European - and he describes it almost with a sense of personal participation which goes well beyond his own chronological span.
Hence, he opens his first essay 'Irish independence: rationale and timing' with an anecdote concerning A. P. Ryan, a distinguished journalist with the Times. In 1962, Ryan was one of a number of correspondents who came to Dublin to report on Ireland's application to join the EEC. When he met FitzGerald, he recalled that when he was previously in Ireland as a young journalist, in 1920, Garret's father, Desmond, then Director of Publicity for the underground Dáil government, had sought to convince him of the case for Ireland's sovereign independence. Now, paradoxically, Ryan observed, Desmond's son was seeking to persuade him that Ireland should give up at least a portion of that sovereignty in order to enter Europe.
"When I later reflected on the challenge that A.P. Ryan had thus posed to me", FitzGerald writes, "I eventually became convinced that far from there being any contradiction between our demand for independence from Britain and our later accession to the European Community, Irish membership of the European Community ultimately justified that independence."
For this reviewer, that first essay is the jewel of the collection for it encompasses virtually the entire span of Irish political history from the immediate post-Famine era to the present day. If one were teaching a history class and only one lesson could be taught, this would ideally be it. It adumbrates the rise of nationalist sentiment in the early years of the 20th century, the Rising of 1916, the economic progression of the country since then and why Northern Ireland is now lagging behind the Republic in its economic well-being. Ireland's present-day prosperity and success are grounded in two things, he argues; its independence politically and economically from Britain and its place within Europe. Had the 1916 rising not taken place, Ireland would have remained tied to the coat-tails of Britain's dwindling economy, albeit with some rebalancing of wealth between the two islands. Our participation in Europe would not have been on the advantageous terms accorded to a sovereign state but those handed down to a region of the UK.
Assiduous readers of Garret FitzGerald's Saturday contributions to The Irish Times over the past 15 years will find themselves picking up familiar themes and material in many of the other essays - the unusual demographics of the Irish state over the decades, the complex interdependencies and tensions between the churches and the political establishment, the oddities of the Irish party system and the bugbear of localism and clientelism. And consistently there is the irresistible - sometimes infuriating - rationality of Garret's analysis, grounded in the statistics and the figures, always challenging one's preconceptions and biases.
In most European countries, the statesman-commentator-philosopher is a well- recognised presence in the public media. Every French and German newspaper has platoons of them vieing with each other for space. But in Ireland it is rare and Garret FitzGerald is certainly the doyen of this limited species. He is a sort of national herald and one ignores his signals at one's peril. I remember one Friday evening in 1993 or possibly 1994, when I read his article for the following morning's editions of The Irish Times. This was an extraordinary and disturbing piece of writing. Garret was predicting labour shortages, a looming phenomenon of immigration, infrastructural crisis and a curtailment of economic growth due to skills shortages. I asked a colleague to telephone him on some pretext, to inquire if he was content to have the article run as presented and, perhaps, to ascertain if he was feeling quite well. It was the first prediction of the coming "Celtic Tiger" era. No less accurately, he also predicted the demise of the economic boom early in 2001.
There are the inevitable, if minor, irritations in the book, sometimes to be found when Garret the politician takes over from Garret the analyst. Thus, he refers to the economic mismanagement of the late 1970s and the attempts to put it to rights in the 1980s without acknowledging any failure by the government he led from 1982 to 1987 to formulate a coherent or fully agreed economic strategy. He can be forgiven. He was, after all, a politician who needed votes - and he got them on a scale never since seen by any leader of Fine Gael.
This is a book that will not easily be absorbed by the casual reader who is not equipped with a good knowledge of Ireland's recent political, social and economic history. But to anyone with a desire or need to get behind and beyond the conventional textbooks on the governance of Ireland it is a rich, indeed, an indispensable resource.
Reflections on the Irish State. By Garret FitzGerald. Irish Academic
Press, 202pp. €32.50
Conor Brady is a journalist and former editor of The Irish Times
